Letter to Filippo Turati, January 30, 1893

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 30 January 1893


First published, in the language of the original (French), in: K. Marx, F. Engels, Scritti italiani, Milano-Roma, 1955
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50


ENGELS TO FILIPPO TURATI

IN MILAN

London, 30 January 1893

Dear citizen Turati,

You will have a few words of introduction tomorrow, if possible.[1]

However, I would ask you not to attach to the 1848 Manifesto the 1884 programme of the English Socialist League. 136 The Manifesto is a historic document, sui generis.[2] and if you attach to it a document dated forty years later, you will give the latter a special character. 108 Moreover, I cannot at the moment find the English original for comparison, because I have not seen it since it first appeared, and I know nothing about the programmes and other publications of the Socialist League, a society which has rapidly become anarchist, so that all those members who did not want to take part in this change of front (the Avelings, Bax, etc.) have withdrawn. As a result the League that has been dead for some time is now only referred to here as an anarchist society. You can imagine, therefore, to what quid pro quo a reprint of the original programme together with the 1848 Manifesto might lead.

Greetings to Mme Kulishov and yourself from Mme Kautsky and yours truly,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ F. Engels, 'To the Italian Reader'.
  2. ↑ unique of its kind